Against Respectability Politics: Conversations on Latina suciedad

Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Martinos Auditorium

Organized around feminist and queer approaches to performance and unconventional archives, this event brings interdisciplinary scholars Deb Vargas(UC Riverside), Dixa Ramírez (Yale) and renown performance artist Nao Bustamante together to discuss Latina suciedad (dirtyness) and abjection as the basis for politicized aesthetics.

Moderated by Leticia Alvarado, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University.

A CSREA Faculty Grant Event.

Co-sponsored by the U.S. Latino Studies Fund, Department of American Studies, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Women's History Month and the Sarah Doyle Women's Center, Latino Heritage Series of the Brown Center for Students of Color, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, and the Creative Arts Council.

Nao Bustamante

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known artist, originally from California; she now resides in upstate New York. Bustamante's precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio Museum of Contemporary Art, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. Currently she holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

www.naobustamante.com

Dixa Ramírez

 Dixa Ramírez is Assistant Professor of Latina/o Literature in American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University. Her research and teaching revolves around gender, national identity, and geographic displacement (e.g., exile and migration) in the literatures and cultures of the Hispanophone and Francophone Caribbean. Ramírez is finishing her first book, Desiring Patriots: Exile, Race, and Gender in Dominican Literature and Performance, which explores how Dominicans have scripted and performed themselves as ideal patriots from the nation's earliest days in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. She has also started to work on her second book, "Frontier Blackness: Alternative Americanity in Borderland Dominican Culture," which investigates Dominican culture of the border from the late nineteenth century until the end of the U.S. occupation in 1924. Her articles have appeared in Atlantic StudiesComparative LiteratureThe Black Scholar, and the Dominican press. 

Deb Vargas

Deb Vargas is Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research and teaching areas include Chicano/Latino cultural studies, critical race feminisms, queer of color critique, popular culture, feminist ethnography, borderlands theory, and oral history methods. She is the author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda, University of Minnesota Press. Currently, she is co-editing with Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Keywords for Latina/o Studies, forthcoming in 2016 from New York University Press. 

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